Apple would prepare an A16 chip for its iPhone 14 still engraved in 5nm. The gain compared to 4nm would indeed be of little interest and the firm at the apple would therefore have chosen security.
Last November, the newspaper The Informationsuggested before anyone else that the A16 Bionic chip of the iPhone 14 ne would not pass the 4 nm mark, thus stagnating at an engraving fineness of 5 nmthe same as the chips of iPhone 12 et iPhone 13. Two concordant leaks from leakers ShrimpApplePro et Ming-Chi Kuo now confirm this information.
The A16 Bionic chip should therefore once once more rely on TSMC’s 5nm manufacturing process, while offering some improved performance on the CPU part, LPDDR5 RAM management and GPU, without further clarification from ShrimpApple. Pro.
An uninteresting 4 nm
The latter also claims that the 4 nm does not bring much: “Samsung and TSMC’s 4nm is just 5nm with a little salt and pepper. » Ming-Chi Kuo agrees and writes for his part: “The N4s have no advantage over the NP5”NP5 designating the second generation of 5 nm which should be equipped with the next A16 chip and which already equipped the A15 Bionic of the iPhone 13.
Therefore, the two leakers consider this choice of Apple reasonable, but they point out that the name change for A16 Bionic is more regarding marketing than real gain from one generation to another.
A less powerful A16, but no doubt mastered
It will of course be necessary to judge on part, but this choice also seems to us to be the right one. It must be admitted, the A15 Bionic chip had literally blown the editorial staff of Frandroid during our tests of the different iPhone 13 by its power and the stability it offered to Apple brand devices.
Even if on pure power, Qualcomm or even MediaTek seem to have come back ahead of Apple, this advance seems to us to be paid for at the cost of risky management of the heating of the phone, like our various tests of phones under Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 confirm it (not to mention theExynos 2200). Passing your turn on a generation to better jump then with a chip mastered in 3 or 4 nm therefore seems to be the right decision.
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